i'll be your safety, you'll be my lady
by but we lost ourselves
Summary: the one where she's disappeared again and he becomes a stalker, but let's be real, he doesn't really care. / part three of some sort of love letter to new york


**let's continue, shall we? to all of those who've reviewed these quirky little snippets, i love you dearly, and please continue. you make me want to pay these two their due respect (or their due storyline).**

 **much love, inez.**

He wasn't entirely sure how he'd ended up there—he was staring up at some sort of rundown apartment complex just off of East 115th Street, where he surmised that she must spend very little time, considering her gallery was still all the way down in SoHo. He wasn't even really sure why he'd decided to drag himself all the way over from Brooklyn. Maybe she didn't even live there anymore. It had, after all, been two years.

He was twenty four, and if he was being honest, he had plenty of more important things to do, like review his cases and make sure that the dogs his father was feeding him to wouldn't actually bite—at least, not in a physical sense.

The last thing he needed to be doing was standing on the sidewalk in East Harlem, staring at an assortment of wheel rims in the shop below the apartments, when his Land Rover was parked in a garage all the way up in the Cape, with stock rims that he had no intentions of exchanging.

He gave a nod to the store clerk, who had been eyeing him, probably sizing him up in a 'what the hell are you doing this far northeast' way, and turned to walk back down the street.

"Hey!"

He spun. The man had a Long Island accent.

"If you're lookin' for that art chick, she moved yesterday. Packed her shit and got out." The man was still staring, but now his eyes were narrowed, as if he'd realized he recognized the young, suit-wearing professional who'd stumbled into his neighborhood at ten in the morning, looking more than a little bit forlorn.

"How'd you know I was looking for her?"

The man scoffed and wiped his hands on a grease towel beside him. "There ain't many people living around here who'd accept company that's the likes of you." He seemed to hesitate, then hastened to add, "No offense, man."

He smiled, just barely, and both men eased up.

"Well, you're right there, even on her count. I'm not usually her kind of company, but sometimes she slums it. She say where she was going?"

"The hell outta here," the man put both his hands on the edge of the desk he was standing behind and pressed, his knuckles whitening out from the pressure. "She had some guy she was seein—Jimmy, maybe it was. He roughed her up pretty bad."

Before he could even comprehend what the man was saying, his sight started to glaze over with red. "He put his hands on her?"

"Well, he practically lived here, so he musta done a lot more than that, know what I'm—" The man must have seen the look in Suit's eyes, because he cut to the chase.

"They was havin some sort of 'domestic dispute,' ya know, at the fire escape one day. All I heard was raised voices, and I peeked around the corner, and she was crying—had tears goin everywhere. When he tried to walk away, she grabbed his arm, and he shoved her off." He paused, sizing up whether or not he should continue or just leave it at that.

"He shoved her off and what happened?" His voice was even. Scary calm.

"She fell on the stairs and it caught her wrong. Knocked up her head. Gave her a black eye. He tried to say he was sorry, that he'd fix her up, that he didn't mean it, but I gave him a good left hook so he'd match and threatened to call the cops. He didn't stick around much longer," the man pushed up off of the desk. "Two days later and I see her givin her key to the landlord. She says, 'Thank you, but I've got to get out of here. Before he comes back.'"

"Praise God, for once, she makes a smart decision."

"I take it you don't know her very well, or you'd know that she's always making some sort of smart decision."

The man probably didn't realize it, but he'd just landed a punch straight to Suit's gut. He made a concentrated effort not to stumble back from the blow. Of course he didn't know her; they'd only interacted over coffee breaks and gallery shows and the rare apartment visit, and only when it was convenient for him, if he was being honest.

He said his quick goodbyes and took off, no longer comfortable in East Harlem, but feeling especially trapped in his tie, all the same. If he'd been in paradise, he probably wouldn't have felt that he fit into the world in that moment. There was a sort of desolation that can only come from being surrounded by millions but understood by none.

For the first time in his life, he felt well and truly alone.

He pulled out his phone—personal, not his work one—and tried her number, but it was years old, and she'd probably changed it and changed it again, the way she changed her hair or her style or her art so frequently. He thought about smashing the cell against the nearest brownstone before he realized that there were no brownstones to smash it against.

He was back in Brooklyn before he realized what he'd done or where he'd gone. His lunch break was well and truly past, as was most of his afternoon, and he wasn't going back to the office that day, his father be damned. He'd just lost the most important person in his life into a city that swallows up everyone and rarely spits them back out.

He tore at his suit, at his life, at his shoulder that still burned to pitch on days when storm fronts were moving in and days that he watched Mets games and remembered how quickly something like professional dreaming can slip through your fingertips when you meet someone who makes all your dreams change.

Damn, if he didn't need liquor. Or coffee.

* * *

An hour later, he found himself with the latter in a Starbucks takeaway cup, feeling like a traitor and a sellout, on the subway to Queens. There were some places he'd never returned—the little corner coffee shop in Manhattan, for one—but there were only a handful of decent candy canes in the Big Apple, even in December.

He once went to New Hampshire, a few days later, in a moment of sick desperation. It was just as terrible as he'd decided it would be, but not because of any offense of the actual state, itself. He tracked her—well, he tried. She had, perhaps, one of the most stereotypical last names in all the region. He felt like a stalker, and probably for good reason. Where she'd gone, he'd probably never know. He went to what he knew as her home town, asked around, was directed to the only part of her that was left there: a white, solemn tombstone, one of thousands, unexceptional, with a father's name etched in marble. It took everything in him not to throw up. He hadn't known, he hadn't known, he hadn't know—

"Sir? Are you okay? Can I help you?"

He was eighty-five, still driving, though his kids begged him not to, coming to visit his son—an Enduring Freedom vet—as he did every Tuesday around 9 a.m. It was the time they'd go for their morning coffee, he said, and say, how do you know so and so?

"I don't."

"Ah. Peppermint?" The old man held out the small round disk, not knowing his companion was already too close to tears.

"No, thanks."

"They were his favorites."

"Oh." He shuddered, pulling himself together. "Then that changes things."

The old man took him to coffee and told him more about the grave he'd been sent to, and the daughter that came to sit at it, once a year, every year, for the past four years—well, ever since it had been there.

"When? Have you seen her?"

"Who are you to be asking?"

It took him a few moments—one away from answering too late. "I'm a man who could love her, if she'd let me. That part's still yet to be decided."

The older man harrumphed, tried to hide his smile. "Oh, son, I have a feeling that it's too late to pretend like she's deciding for you."

The younger man just slammed back his coffee like it was something much stronger.

"You'll see her around here soon enough. She'll be into the café in the morning for some fru-fru something or another."

"Peppermint mocha, whipped cream upside down."

"You really do love her."

"Well, I was her barista for two years."

The older man eyed him—his nice clothes, his confidence. "You've come a long way since makin' joe."

"Not so far."

"Say, what _do_ you do?"

"Something incredibly boring in an office on Park Avenue."

"Ah. Not quite her type."

"No. It's an unlikely pairing. I played for the Mets for a few years."

"She hates baseball."

"Why do you think I quit?"

"You didn't tell her why, did you?"

"Of course not. I said I was too slow."

"You weren't. You were the fastest on that team. I saw. Hit the most homeruns too."

"I know."

"She believed you?"

"Not for a second, but she pretended to."

"Ah. Well, in that case, I guess you'll be sticking around for a while." The old man held out a hand. "Nice to meet you, son. I'm her grandfather."

The two men sat—one old, one young, both handsome, confident, with kind eyes—measuring one another up.

The youngest thought this was probably some sort of sick joke, but it wasn't.

It's a small world after all? Too small, if you asked him. When it came to this girl, at least.

"Sir," he shook the old man's hand.

"She's been through a lot," he said, not understanding the flash of anger and pain behind the young man's eyes.

"Yes sir."

"Take care of her."

"I intend to."

* * *

He sat in the same seat the next morning, a bouquet of melon-colored roses and yellow daisies on the table beside his cup of coffee. No matter their meaning—passion and purity, respectively—they were her favorites, and he was always sending them to her on rainy days. That is, until she fell off the face of the earth.

He'd been there thirty minutes, and his coffee was cold. He'd get a refill, he thought, standing up, stretching, feeling his flannel pull taught across his back, thinking "I could go back. I would swing a bat again, if she'd just not worry so much."

"Don't worry so much." It had been the last thing he'd said to her—exactly the wrong thing. It was funny, the way New York could swallow a person up so easily with one wrong word.

He shook his head. He'd found her again—that's all that mattered. He tried to pretend that he didn't feel like a stalker. He didn't have to pretend that he didn't care.

She came in when he was refilling his hand-thrown mug. He didn't turn around—didn't see her—but he knew. That wire stretched taught, zinged with an electric current that he'd missed, that sometimes he dreaded.

She knew; surely she knew.

"One peppermint mocha, whipped cream upside down, please." She sounded older, more guarded, and part of him hated it. The other part wondered at how something like that happened so fast—over a year—and at how stupid he'd been to manage to miss it.

She was distracted—that much even she would admit. She had a lot on her mind. The more her bruises yellowed, the more her brain raced.

She wouldn't think of the monster again, so she decided to think of other things.

Her new collection was due for the gallery in days, and she wasn't happy with any of the pieces. Christmas was in two weeks, and she'd left all the presents she'd bought in the apartment with him.

No, she wouldn't think of him. She wouldn't.

Instead, she put two dollars in the tip jar and turned, perusing her scone options and hoping for raspberry. She wasn't disappointed.

"Thanks," she murmured as the woman—Pam—took the last scone out of the warmer and took it back for toasting and butter, just the way she liked it.

She went to sit, saw a bouquet on a table closest to the frosty window, and paused.

It was like someone dunked her in the snow outside.

She turned slowly, surveying the room, as stupid as it was. A bouquet was just that—a bunch of flowers. She was ridiculous and wishful. She'd lost him when she'd found the—well, no. She wasn't thinking of him.

A flash of plaid caught her eye.

She knew that back—the dark chestnut hair, the broad shoulders, on down to areas she had to force her eyes away from. In her universe, there was only one frame so strong, that so easily sucked up all the air in an entire room without even meaning to.

He exhaled and turned, and their eyes locked—dark green on glittering hazel.

"Hi," he said from right where he stood. Half of the room turned to look at them, and she vaguely thought _I know these people and I've known them my whole life and this man who is half ghost should not be here amongst them_.

"Hi."

"Prove that a hero equals any jerk."

"E. E. Cummings," she smiled, half-hearted but melting all the same. "You heard."

He took a step forward, testing. "Ain't freedom grand?"

She was warm in his arms, even more slight than the last time, tucked into his chest like why did she ever leave there? Why did she ever trade this for someone who wasn't even half of this man who understood her so completely?

"I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens." The verse was a whisper off her breath, a bit lip and no, she wouldn't cry, she wouldn't. It was just such a relief to be held after so long of being hurt. "Only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses."


End file.
